News & Events

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the short-term effects on achievement, study behaviours and attitude of an intervention providing extra instruction time to students in lower secondary schools in southern Italy. We use a difference-in-differences strategy and compare two contiguous cohorts of students enrolled in the same class for two consecutive years. We control for sorting of students and teachers across classes using the fact that, due to a recent reform, the group of teachers assigned to each class is stable over time. We find that the programme increased performances in mathematics but found no effect for Italian language test scores; the programme increased positive attitudes towards both subjects. We investigate the heterogeneity of the effects focusing on the gender dimension and  find that boys and girls react differently to the intervention: girls use the extra instruction time as a complement to regular home study, while boys use it as a substitute.

We study the educational choices of children of immigrants in a tracked school system. We first show that immigrant boys in Italy enroll disproportionately into vocational high schools, as opposed to technical and academically-oriented high schools, compared to natives of similar ability. Immigrant girls, instead, choose similar schools as native ones. We then estimate the impact of a large-scale, randomized intervention providing tutoring and career counseling to high-ability immigrant students. Male treated students increase their probability of enrolling into the high track to the same level of natives, also closing the gap in terms of grade retention. There are no significant effects on immigrant females, who exhibit similar choices and performance as native ones in absence of the intervention. Increases in academic motivation and the resulting changes in teachers’ recommendation regarding high school choice explain a sizable portion of the effect, while the effect of increases in cognitive skills is negligible. Finally, we find positive spillovers on immigrant classmates of treated students, while there is no effect on native classmates.

In this paper, we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental child care availability in the employment of women who have children under 15. We focus on Italy for two reasons: first, it has low rates of female employment and little formal child care provision, and second, it has undergone several pension reforms in a relatively short time span. Our analysis shows that, among the women studied, those whose own mothers are retirement eligible have a 13 percent higher probability of being employed than those whose mothers are ineligible. The pension eligibility of maternal grandfathers and paternal grandparents, however, has no significant effect on the women’s employment probability. We also demonstrate that the eligibility of maternal grandmothers mainly captures the effect of their availability for child care. Hence, pension reforms, by potentially robbing households of an important source of flexible, low-cost child care, could have unintended negative consequences for the employment rates of women with children.

The paper analyses the impact of grandparenting on individuals' fertility behaviour using longitudinal data from eleven European countries. In particular, we focus on how siblings may share and compete for grandparents' time in terms of childcare. By considering different family scenarios, we show that availability of grandparenting play an important role in individuals' decision making for having children. Grandparenting is particularly important in the South of Europe where public childcare is limited and here we see a large impact of grandparenting on fertility.

Using data from seven countries drawn from the Generations and Gender Survey, we study the relationship between informal childcare provided by grandparents and mothers' employment. The extent of formal childcare varies substantially across European countries and so does the role of grandparents in helping out rearing children. The extent of grandparenting also depends on their attitudes, which in turn relate to social norms and availability of public childcare, and hence the country context where individuals reside matters considerably. Within families, attitudes toward childcare are associated with attitudes towards women's working decisions. The fact that we do not observe these attitudes may bias the estimates. By using instrumental variable techniques we find that only in some countries mothers' employment is positively and significantly associated with grandparents providing childcare. In other countries, once we control for unobserved attitudes we do not find this effect.

We empirically investigate the determinants of the female decision of investing in post-secondary education, focusing on the role played by the context where young women take their education decision. We first develop a stylized two-period model to analyse the female decision of investing in education and highlight two main determinants: the time to be devoted to child care and the probability of working in a skilled job. We then use data on educational decisions of women in the 17-21 age group drawn from EU-Silc, available for the years 2004-2008. From the same survey we construct context indicators at the regional level, and exploit regional variability to identify how women's educational investment reacts to changes in the surrounding context. We find that the share of working women with children below 5 and the share of women with managerial positions or self-employed positively affect the probability that women enrol in post-secondary education. The same does not hold for men.

We use the theory of planned behavior to investigate the role of attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control on short-term and long-term fertility intentions, using data from Norway (N = 1,307). There is some evidence that, net of other background variables, positive scores on these factors makes it easier to establish concrete childbearing plans, especially among parents. Subjective norms are particularly important among both parents and childless adults, while perceptions of behavioural control have no additional effect once the actual life situation is taken into account. Attitudes are not important in decisions about the timing of becoming a parent, probably because the main issue for childless adults is not the timing, but the decision to have a child or not.

A fundamental switch in the fertilitydevelopment relationship has occurred so that among highly developed countries, further socioeconomic development may reverse the declining fertility trend. Here we shed light on the mechanisms underlying this reversal by analyzing the links between development and age and cohort patterns of fertility, as well as the role of gender equality. Using data from 1975 to 2008 for over 100 countries, we show that the reversal exists both in a period and a cohort perspective and is mainly driven by increasing older reproductive-age fertility. We also show that the positive impact of development on fertility in high-development countries is conditional on gender equality: countries ranking high in development as measured by health, income, and education but low in gender equality continue to experience declining fertility. Our findings suggest that gender equality is crucial for countries wishing to reap the fertility dividend of high development.

Using a specific data set drawn from the Spanish Module Education to Labour Market Transitions (2000), this paper analyses the labour market entrance of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life. Moreover, special attention is paid to graduates, because Spain experienced a strong growth in the demand for higher education during the last decades of 20th century. The empirical evidence shows that, besides other personal and family individual's characteristics, human capital exerts a strong influence on the finding of an employment. With regard to the match between education and work, the results indicate that over-education is a common phenomenon in the Spanish youth labour market. However, unlike what one could expect, being a graduate seems to be associated to a lower likelihood of over-education in the first employment.

Surveys differ in the way they measure satisfaction and happiness, so comparative research findings are vulnerable to distortion by survey design differences. We examine this using the British Household Panel Survey, exploiting its changes in question design and parallel use of different interview modes. We find significant biases in econometric results, particularly for gender differences in attitudes to the wage and hours of work. Results suggest that the common empirical finding that women care less than men about their wage and more about their hours may be an artifact of survey design rather than a real behavioural difference.